Tag Archives | Comics

Whose side do you take with respect to the new Before Watchmen prequels: Alan Moore (against) or Dave Gibbons (for)? From Wired:

Everything old at DC Comics is new again, again. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ canonical miniseries about superheroes and power — and their horrific abuses — is being predictably rebooted as a prequel franchise.

Just don’t call it a reboot, said Before Watchmen series editor and Wolverine and Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein, who also served as Moore and Gibbons’ original Watchmen editor in the 1980s.

“To me, a reboot is what DC is essentially doing with the New 52, which is changing costumes, origins, relationships, essentially looking at old characters through new eyes,” Wein said in an e-mail to Wired. “What we’re doing is filling in a lot of the blank spaces in a story that has already, to some degree, been told. There were still a lot of gaps in the histories of Watchmen‘s characters, and events only mentioned in passing or touched on briefly in the original story.

Bullpen Bulletin! A “real world” conflict based on the bottom line has infringed on the civil liberties of our uncanny “fictional” heroes, who have lately made a ton of dough for their corporate creator. Grant Morrison has tread this ground in Animal Man to explore the dynamic between the creator and the creation, but sans the grand mega-corporate, economic drama. (Probably need to see Seaguy for that: I wonder if Mickey Eye is behind the actions of Marvel’s Law Defense Team!)

Comic creator David Rees, known for Get Your War On, has put forth Get Your Censor On, an attempt to convey what life may be like under the much-feared Stop Online Piracy Act. If we don’t band together to work to prevent SOPA from coming to fruition in Congress, you could find yourself having conversations such as these in the near future:

Just in time for the holidays, Al Franken's animated comic tells the biblical story of Supply Side Jesus -- basically, a version of Christ the savior updated to be more palatable for the devout conservative Christians of today. Witness the tale of his radical free-market teachings:

Not something you would expect from an 86-year-old. Andy Khouri writes on Comics Alliance:

“Rage comics” are a memetic phenomenon by which crude digital drawings of different facial expressions and physical gestures are remixed infinitely by countless individuals to convey the elation, despair, love and hatred of the Internet hive mind. We usually talk about these comics in ironically grandiose terms (like when a rage comic face appeared in a man’s testicular sonogram) but the truth is that many of them are genuinely hilarious reads (like the Rage Comics All Stars’ “performance” of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), and some are even quite touching.

Because rage comics typically express primal responses to utterly mundane but often “scene”-specific experiences, it would seem unlikely that an 86-year-old man would be the author of what many Reddit users are calling the greatest rage comic ever made. Published earlier this week on the man’s birthday, the comic details in deeply personal terms the events of his life, beginning with his earlier memories from childhood and including his service in World War II, estrangement from his children and discovery of true love.

Keane was a good sport about fake Amazon reviews that gushed about supposedly hidden literary themes in collections of his newspaper comic strips, and he once even drew his own characters into a “guest appearance” in a Zippy the Pinhead strip. But in 1999, Keane’s syndicate threatened legal action against the “Dysfunctional Family Circus” site, which had been re-captioning Keane’s cartoons for over four years.

Heading off a “free speech” showdown, Keane resolved the situation with a friendly phone call to the webmaster, who ultimately decided to voluntarily remove the images just because “He’s actually a nice guy.”

Cartooning legend Syd Hoff wrote comics for the New Yorker for 44 years and illustrated dozens of children’s books. However, under the alias A. Redfield, he also created work with a harder-hitting tone for the Daily Worker and New Masses. Via Phil Nel, a collection of Hoff’s political cartoons, which remain as poignant and relevant as ever, in light of the world we live in today: